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12 October 2013

While everyone else has spent the last few days obsessing about Gravity, the
government shutdown, and the real possibility that the NFC East
division champ will have six wins, it’s quietly been an interesting week
for sociology nerds who think about marriage.

The first came in a post from Richard Reeves and Joanna Venator (reacting to a Derek Thompson essay at the Atlantic) over
at Brookings. The three researchers all look at marriage and social
mobility. and make a pretty convincing case that the obvious is probably
true: The decline in marriage—especially among the non-elites—has
contributed to the decline in social mobility we’ve seen in recent
years.

As Reeves and Venator explain:

The rise in single mothers matters for
income inequality. But it’s a concern for social mobility too. On this
blog, we have highlighted the rising number of single mothers
among twenty-somethings—and what it means for the future prospects and
mobility of children. Children of married parents have better life
outcomes, in terms of education, health, and income—in large part
because they have more resources available to them.

Thompson focuses briefly on what he calls the
“marriage gap,” or what academics inelegantly call “assortative mating.”
This signals the tendency of like to marry like: those who are college
educated and high-earning marry each other; and those with less
education and less income marry each other (if they marry at all).

Brookings has examined the role of assortative mating in the context of economic mobility and gender.
One reason women stay in the income brackets of their parents is that
they marry someone from a similar background: the earnings of a married
woman’s husband bear as much resemblance to her parents’ income as her
own earnings.

Marriage, then, becomes another mechanism through
which advantage is protected and passed on. Affluent, committed parents
tend to get married, stay married, and raise their children together.
Indeed, this is arguably now the main social purpose of marriage. As
women have advanced in the workplace, the rationale for marriage has
become about child-rearing, not income-sharing.

So, marriage is important for the social mobility of adults and their children. Good to know.

But it turns out that not all marriages are created
equal. You can forgive Mark Regnerus for his nearly gleeful tone in the
other big piece, a dissection of the study by Douglas Allen in the new Review of Economics of the Household. (You can read Regnerus’s Public Discourse piece here; the actual journal article will run you $40, but it’s worth it, here.)

Allen’s study is pretty powerful because he uses a
giant sample-set: the 20 percent sample from the 2006 Canadian census,
which looks at the educational outcomes for children raised by gay
couples, versus single parents, versus heterosexual couples.

This is the most significant study done by a large
margin. In previous studies looking at outcomes, the number of gay
couples examined has typically been in the double digits. Since 1995,
only ten attempts to study these outcomes have had a sample bigger than
100, the biggest of these being a 2010 study with 3,502 gay couples.
Allen’s sample winds up much more than twice as big.

What Allen examined was high school graduation
rates for children living in a household with same-sex parents versus
married, opposite sex parents. (In Canada, same-sex couples have had all
the benefits of marriage since 1997 and actual gay marriage since
2005.) As Regnerus summarizes, “the study is able to compare—side by
side—the young-adult children of same-sex couples and opposite-sex
couples, as well as children growing up in single-parent homes and other
types of households.”

So what did Allen find? Three big effects:

* children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others;

* children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others;

* the other four types [common law, gay, single
mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the
married/lesbian extremes

How much worse off were children of same-sex parents? Quite a bit. Here’s Regnerus again:

[T]he children of gay and lesbian
couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high
school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender
matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters
of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates. . . .

Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot
be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education
of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized
by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be
enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples.
And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their
own schooling.

The same is true of the young-adult children of
common law parents, as well as single mothers and single fathers,
highlighting how little—when you lean on large, high-quality samples—the
data have actually changed over the past few decades. The intact,
married mother-and-father household remains the gold standard for
children’s progress through school.

It will be interesting to see if anyone cares about
Allen’s findings. In America, I suspect they won’t. For better or
worse, the fight over same-sex marriage in the states has turned on
questions of fairness, federalism, natural law, and religious freedom.
If our elites do bother to engage with Allen’s research, it will
probably be only to tag him as History’s Greatest Monster for a day or
so.

But I’m particularly interested in what they might
do with this data in France. In France, same-sex marriage has been
principally opposed by arguments in favor of the rights of children. Douglas Allen’s inconvenient study should give a great deal of support to the opposition movement.